Conversion rate optimization or CRO is a continuous process that increases the percentage of your website visitors who take a required action. This action can be anything from signing up for your newsletter to making a purchase. The key to CRO is understanding how your visitors use your website. Tracking their moves, without being intrusive, will show you exactly what links they click on, how long they spend on each page, and what’s stopping them from converting.
The action will vary depending on whether we’re talking about a macro or a micro conversion. For example, if you’re using your website to sell your product, the macro conversion is the purchase of a product. Naturally, micro-conversions are also possible, regardless of the purpose of your website. These micro-conversions include smaller, less important actions, such as registering an account on the website, downloading a free PDF or signing up for your newsletter.
The conversion rate of your website is calculated by dividing the number of times your visitors complete actions by the total traffic of your website. CRO is a process that happens after your potential customer visits your website. There’s a difference between CRO and optimizing your ads for conversions.
Calculating Your Current Conversion Rate
There are multiple ways through which you can calculate your conversion rate, depending on the type of website that you have. If you’re selling products, the opportunity for conversion is always available for your users, regardless of how many times they’ve visited your website. For a unique visitor, each visit is known as a session.
To calculate the conversion rate of a single user, you have to divide the number of orders by the number of sessions. If your unique visitor makes a purchase during his second visit, the conversion rate is 50%. To calculate the current conversion rate for your entire website, simply use the total number of sessions and the total number of orders.
On the other hand, if you are selling a subscription-based service, the conversion rate is calculated a bit differently. This time around, the number of unique visitors is taken into consideration, rather than the number of sessions that each visitor has.
Every visitor that purchases a subscription, is considered a conversion. Each unique visitor that makes a purchase will have a 100% conversion rate. In order to calculate your current conversion rate in this case, you have to divide the total number of orders by the number of unique visitors.
The Benefits Of CRO For SEO
Because CRO doesn’t actually attract visitors to your website, it isn’t directly linked to SEO. However, this doesn’t mean it lacks benefits:
Better Insights
Conversion rate optimization helps you understand how your customers use the website. This is especially important because if you’re selling something, because you’re actually trying to attract people who convert, rather than high numbers of people who leave your website without making a purchase.
Return On Investment
The higher the conversion rate, the better the return on your investment. By analyzing and improving your conversion rate, you’re also improving your ROI by earning more and spending less.
Improved Scalability
Your business will eventually grow but it doesn’t mean that your audience will grow too. There’s only so many people that your business can attract over a given amount of time. Through conversion rate optimization, you’re increasing the number of conversions within the same number of visitors.
User Experience
One of the most important aspects of running a successful online business is offering a great experience for your visitors. The better the experience, the more likely a user is to stick around and end up converting. CRO allows you to closely analyze the habits of your users and improve your website’s functionality accordingly.
Trustworthiness
Your website is the face of your company. If it doesn’t look and feel professional, users will be less likely to share their personal information with you. A high rate of micro-conversions can’t be achieved without constantly updating your website according to your user’s habits.
Key Insights For A Successful CRO Campaign
There are 3 insights that you have to know in order to run a successful CRO campaign. These are: where to optimize, what to optimize, and who to optimize for. In order to know the answers to these questions, you must first gather and analyze the data.
Quantitative Data Analysis
This method gives you the hard numbers that you need. Using a solid analytics platform like Google Analytics should do the trick. The essential data that you should be looking into are entry location of your visitors, website features that they use, the device they used to browse, demographics, and the moment when they leave your website. Knowing this lets you focus your attention on the parts of your website that receive the most attention.
Qualitative Data Analysis
If the first method gives you information regarding the raw numbers, this one gives you the “why?” behind those numbers. Of course, these two methods work hand in hand. The qualitative analysis requires the quantitative data in order to work. The most successful qualitative data analysis works when trying to find the “perfect” customer. In order to do this, you create surveys, such as site or satisfaction surveys. These surveys bring in data related to the reasoning behind your visitor’s actions. What brought them to your website, what caught their attention, why didn’t they convert, are just a few of the questions that can be answered.
By answering them and by looking at the bigger picture, you will be able to fully understand the way your visitors reach the decision to convert. Understanding this process allows you to cater to the needs of your potential visitors. Increasing your conversion rate will increase your profits and your company’s visibility, making it more successful as time goes by.
